Blazing Bullet Train: How the Federal Government Enables State Waste

California cannot balance its budget and faces a deficit in the neighborhood of $16 billion. More than 10 percent of California workers are unemployed and the state economy shows few signs of recovery. Yet the state wants to build a bullet train and has established a high-speed rail “authority” for that purpose. If approved it would be one of the largest public works project in history, with cost estimates of $68 billion, down from $100 billion, which likely underestimates the true figure. When government builds something it always costs more, largely because of measures such as Davis-Bacon laws, which alone can increase construction costs by more than 35 percent.

“The need for a bullet train, however, exists only in the minds of its ardent backers,” notes Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee. As he explains, the state’s north-south highways are not congested and air service is frequent and cheap.

Brown is comparing the bullet train to the Golden Gate Bridge, which did meet a legitimate need, and which California paid for all by itself. Walters observes that “Brown wants the federal government to pony up nearly two-thirds of the bullet train’s construction cost, whatever it might be. . . Or, in reality, he wants a federal government that’s running up monumental deficits to borrow even more for California.”

That makes little sense. If the federal government wants to show leadership it should get its own house in order and oppose state boondoggle projects instead of enabling them. In this case, as Alex Karras said in Blazing Saddles, it all has to do “with where choo-choo go.” That politically incorrect movie, which could not be made today, teaches another economic lesson.

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